Posts Tagged ‘cops’

Three NY police officers from the 101st Precinct in Far Rockaway last Wednesday faked a traffic stop so help Yehuda Coriat, 22, could propose to his girlfriend Sara Oppen, 20, in Queens, the NY Post reported Friday. The officers, asked to help a guy in need by Yoel Tyrnauer, a member of the Borough Park Shomrim volunteer society, pulled over Sara’s car, on suspicion that she and her boyfriend were trafficking weapons and drugs in the trunk.

After grilling the poor woman about her boyfriend’s supposedly shady activities, the officers insisted that she open her trunk, which she did, releasing the balloons that had been stashed inside.

Yehuda then got down on one knee and asked Sara to be his betrothed.

The Post, in its unique fashion, used the story to rehash the NYPD bribery scandal involving accusations against the Shomrim, and so Tyrnauer told the Post he had asked for the favor not as a member of the Shomrim group but just as a guy asking his local cops for a favor. “I don’t know the cops. This whole thing has nothing to do with Shomrim,” he said.

Sara said the cops “weren’t on duty at the time. They did him a favor. They came in dressed up, got the car and did the whole getup just as a favor.”

Which goes to show you that good deeds rarely go unpunished, and sweet gestures can get a man in deep trouble.

In 2014, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio ripped the NYPD after the death of Eric Garner, who was subjected to a submission hold by the police during an arrest for selling “loose” cigarettes, and then died of a heart attack. De Blasio went on national television and said, “What parents have done for decades who have children of color, especially young men of color, is train them to be very careful when they have…an encounter with a police officer.” He then said that he’d told his own son, who is black, about the supposed racism of the police: “With Dante, very early on, we said, ‘Look, if a police officer stops you, do everything he tells you to do. Don’t move suddenly. Don’t reach for your cellphone. Because we knew, sadly, there’s a greater chance it might be misinterpreted if it was a young man of color. It’s different for a white child. That’s just the reality in this country.”

That isn’t the reality in this country – a new study reported by The New York Times says that black people are significantly less likely to be shot by police than white people in similar circumstances.

But those lies matter.

Days after De Blasio’s statements, two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were murdered in cold blood by criminal Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who pledged to put “wings on pigs.” When De Blasio attended the funeral for Ramos, hundreds of officers openly turned their backs on him. De Blasio wasn’t responsible for the deaths of the officers, but he was certainly responsible for slandering them before their murders.

In Dallas, officers should do the same to President Obama.

Obama isn’t responsible for the murder of Dallas police officers, as I wrote last week. But, like De Blasio, he is responsible for slandering them before their murders. Hours before the massacre, Obama said that police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota – both of which were under investigation, and about which Obama said he knew little – were “not isolated incidents. They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.” Obama then reeled off a list of statistics designed to show systemic racism against black people by cops – ignoring, of course, higher rates of criminality in the black community. He added, “when incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if because of the color of their skin they are not being treated the same. And that hurts. And that should trouble all of us.”

But there are a large number of cops who feel – rightly – that because of the color of their uniform, they aren’t treated the same. The President doesn’t wait for evidence before charging them with racism. He doesn’t separate off the bad apples from the rest of the police community. He simply talks about institutional racism, providing no solutions, and then postures for the cameras.

And after the Dallas massacre, President Obama is still pretending bewilderment at the motivation for the shootings: “I think it’s very hard to untangle the motives of the shooter,” Obama said on Saturday. He had no such problems ascribing motivations to police officers without evidence.

He’s been doing this for years. Back in 2014, just before the shootings of Liu and Ramos, Obama condemned the cops, saying that racism was “something deeply rooted in our society; it’s deeply rooted in our history.”

There is a reason that the vicious, vacuous Black Lives Matter movement has taken off under President Obama: he’s incentivized them, backed them, supported their evidence-free argument that the criminal justice system is racist. And that movement, with Democratic help, has dramatically polarized race relations in the country. That has real, predictable effects, including less trust of police in black communities and greater anger at police departments.

Cops have every right to be angry at the president who slanders them. They should show it instead of allowing President Obama to use the funerals for the officers he slandered for his own brand of political agitprop.

Israel Police plan to award a commendation to a patrolman and an auxiliary policeman who killed the terrorist who had committed a string of attacks in Jaffa in early March, killing an American tourist and wounding 12. US Vice President Joe Biden was participating in an event at the Peres Center nearby while the attacks were taking place.

District commander Brigadier-General Yehuda Dahan made the recommendation for the award because the two men “showed an effort to make contact with their actions, and thus prevented attacks on other civilians.” Tel Aviv District Police Commander Major General Moshe Edri approved the recommendation.

The citations will be awarded despite criticism at the time that the auxiliary policeman was seen shooting the terrorist, Bashar Masalha, 22, from Kalkilya, while standing over him after he had been neutralized and was lying on the grass.

A police HR committee will discuss in the coming days whether or not to accept the recommendations, Walla reported Sunday. It appears that the policeman, who shot the terrorist first, will receive the Medal of Distinguished Service, while the auxiliary cop will receive a certificate of appreciation.

The video documentation of the incident shows police chasing after the terrorist who was still armed with a knife and escaping from the Jaffa harbor area northbound, towards Tel Aviv. He ran on the promenade and attacked pedestrians. He was then shot by a policeman, fell down and then the auxiliary cop shot him again, saying he identified him as still being dangerous.

The same video also contains comments by people standing near the scene who encouraged the auxiliary man with calls to “give him one in the head, don’t be afraid, give him in the head.” After the shot, one of the people present is heard saying, “Good, good, you’re king. Bravo, give him in the head, my brother.”

“How can you be nauseated when you watch the riot police using the taser again and again on the settler Boaz Albert who’s lying on the floor screaming in pain,” writes on her Facebook page MK Zehava Gal-On, chair of the left wing Meretz party, who has no love lost for the settlement movement. But the level of abuse and brutality on the part of the police in this case has cut through political dividing lines.

A video produced and distributed by the Yitzhar outpost spokesperson’s office shows local resident Boaz Albert being subdued by a team of policemen who arrested him for breaking an administrative restraining order banning him from setting foot in the settlement.

His wife and children are living there. He sneaked in to see them. Somebody called the cops.

In the video, police barge into Albert’s home, the screen goes dark and we hear him screaming in pain. Then a police officer is seen holding a stun gun and threatening to use it against Albert who is begging not to be tasered again, crying out that he’s emphatically not resisting arrest—while one of the cops is saying:”Electricute him already.” Then four police carry Albert out in a manner that could not possibly enable him to resist them – then, in the dark we hear him screaming in agony as some cop apparently shot him full of volts just for the fun of it.

“There is no justification in the world for using this cruel weapon on a man who is not acting violently and does not present danger to the four cops who hover over him and who could easily arrest him without a problem.”

Gal-On said that she is fighting for the rights of settlers against police abuse, just as she’s fighting on behalf of Palestinians who are arrested without trial. She called on the right to join her in condemning both kinds of police violations of people’s civil rights.

Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar of “Women in Green” also condemned the “scandalous arrest of Boaz Albert, a resident of Yitzhar, a father of six, in a violent military operation in which security forces shot him and his brother with iron arrows from a Taser gun and wounded him. All this because of Albert’s ‘crime’ of refusing to obey the immoral and anti-democratic edict of expulsion that was given him.”

The Women in Green contend that “these expulsion orders are used solely against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria and not against Arab stone-throwers nor against the European anarchists that attack soldiers.”

Katsover and Matar call on the “Eretz Israel” lobby MKs to intervene in the case. Meanwhile, Albert has been set free by a district court judge in Lod on friday afternoon.

A demonstration is planned for 10 PM israel time, in the Beit El area, to protest police cruelty against Boaz Albert.